[1047] TW: The Twilight Streets, explaining how Abaddon came to be imprisoned beneath Cardiff (TW: End of Days).
[1048] The Android Invasion. Bell lived 1847-1922.
[1049] Father’s Day. Bell’s famous phone call occurred on 10th March, 1876.
[1050] Players (p62), Festival of Death. Custer was killed 25th June, 1876.
[1051] The Edge of Destruction. Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated between 1875-1896.
[1052] Doctor Who and the Pirates
[1053] TW: Trace Memory
[1054] “When Worlds Collide”. Billy the Kid lived 1859-1881.
[1055] Dating Imperial Moon (PDA #34) - It’s “the year of our Lord 1878” (p7).
[1056] Dating Tooth and Claw (X2.2) - The Doctor gives the date as “1879”. The book Creatures and Demons (a nonfiction book about various Doctor Who monsters) suggests that the parallel universe first seen in Rise of the Cybermen diverged from our history because Queen Victoria was killed in their (Doctorless) version of these events. The series itself was going to state this, but Russell T Davies decided against it. While it might explain why the Britain of that universe is a Republic, it doesn’t explain why the Queen’s successor would create Torchwood - an organisation founded in response to the Doctor and Rose irritating Victoria. Perhaps the Queen’s death at the hands of a werewolf triggered an urge to defend Britain against such foes.
[1057] TW: Children of Earth
[1058] Army of Ghosts, with the date of the Charter’s establishment stated in The Torchwood Archives and on Home Office files in TW: Children of Earth.
[1059] TW: Risk Assessment. The Torchwood Archives establishes that Victoria gave orders for the founding of Torchwood Cardiff in 1879. TW: Slow Decay provides confirmation that it was operating no later than 1885.
[1060] TW: Golden Age
[1061] TW: “Rift War”
[1062] “Wormwood”
[1063] Storm Warning. Roarke’s Drift occurred on 22nd to 23rd January, 1879.
[1064] Dating Evolution (MA #2) - It is the “year of grace eighteen hundred and eighty” (p6, p108). Events here seem to influence Conan Doyle regarding The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was written in 1902. Kipling lived 1865-1936, so he is “15” here (p45).
[1065] Storm Warning. No date given, but the Doctor did meet him in Evolution. Conan Doyle lived 1859-1930.
[1066] Tooth and Claw (TV). Bell lived 1837-1911, and Conan Doyle studied under him. Note that in The Moonbase, the Doctor remembers studying in Glasgow under Lister in 1888. Either he studied under both, or has altered the details slightly here.
[1067] Storm Warning, ”The Golden Ones”. Despite the eleventh Doctor using “Geronimo” as a catch-phrase, only these two stories claim that he actually met the man. Geronimo lived 16th June, 1829, to 17th February, 1909. He instigated revenge attacks after soldiers killed his family in 1858, and surrendered in 1886.
[1068] Dating “The Greatest Gamble” (DWM #56) - The date is given.
[1069] TW: The Twilight Streets
[1070] TW: To the Last Man
[1071] Dating The Gunfighters (3.8) - The story ends with the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The depiction of events owes more to the popular myths and Hollywood treatment of the story than historical accuracy.
[1072] Dating FP: Erasing Sherlock (FP novel #5) - The story ends with the eruption of Krakatoa on its historical date of 26th August, 1883; many dating notations mark the progression of the story through the year beforehand. Gillian says that the woman whose identity she adopts, “died in early August, just before I arrived” - but Gillian is already ensconced in Holmes’ household when the story opens, and it’s said to be “autumn” on p13, “November” on p27 (how much time passes between the two isn’t immediately clear). While the adventure is based upon the premise that nefarious parties are trying to change Holmes’ timeline, it’s also implied that he regains his moral compass enough to become the same detective seen in Conan Doyle’s stories (and, by extension) in Doctor Who.
[1073] Inferno, Rose. The ninth Doctor also visited the scene. Krakatoa erupted in 1883.
[1074] SJA: The Lost Boy
[1075] According to the sixth Doctor in “Changes”. Vincent and the Doctor doesn’t rule out that van Gogh and the Doctor (in another body) have met before; in fact, that story has van Gogh claim, “My brother’s always sending doctors...”
[1076] The Resurrection of Mars
[1077] Time and the Rani. Pasteur lived 1822-1895.
[1078] The Room with No Doors
[1079] The Gallifrey Chronicles
[1080] Ghost Light. It is unclear from the story whether the plateau really existed or was merely a delirious Fenn-Cooper’s rationalisation of his adventures in Gabriel Chase.
[1081] Dating Ghost Light (26.2) - Set “two years” after 1881, when Mackenzie is sent to investigate the disappearance of Sir George Pritchard, and “a century” before Ace burns down Gabriel Chase in 1983. It’s a time of year when the sun sets at six pm (so either the spring or autumn). The script suggested that a caption slide “Perivale - 1883” might be used over the establishing shot of Gabriel Chase. Queen Victoria was a Hanover, not a Saxe-Coburg, but late in her reign she did acquire the nickname “Mrs Saxe-Coburg”.
[1082] “The Time Machination”
[1083] Justine is “barely 16” in FP: Movers, set circa March 1899. If the word “barely” can be taken at all literally, she was born in 1883.
[1084] Assassin in the Limelight. This is historical, and remains a secondary tragedy inflicted on those attending Ford’s Theatre with Lincoln. After killing his wife, Rathbone lived in an asylum in Hildesheim, Germany, and died himself in 1911. He was buried alongside Clara in Hildesheim until the authorities deemed their graves as extremely unattended, and had the gravesites destroyed in 1952. Rathbone and Clara’s eldest son served as a U.S. Congressman from Illinois, Lincoln’s home state.
[1085] The Green Death
[1086] The Three Companions. Stevenson lived 1850-1894.
[1087] Dating SJA: The Ghost House (SJA audiobook #4) - The year is given. Skak’s time manipulator relies upon Zygma energy, which was first mentioned in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
[1088] Dating Peacemaker (NSA #21) - It’s the “1880s” according to the back cover. Similarly, the Doctor licks his thumb, holds it up to the air, and determines, “This is 1880-something, I reckon. A Monday. Just after breakfast.” The Time Machine was published “ten years” after this (in 1895).
[1089] Dating Timelash (22.5) - The Doctor applies “a time deflection coefficient of 706 years” to the timelash’s original destination of 1179, and concludes that Vena will arrive in “1885... AD”. The Terrestrial Index set this in “c1891”, after The Time Machine was written.
[1090] The Ghosts of N-Space
[1091] Deadly Reunion
[1092] Christmas on a Rational Planet. No date given, but Blavatsky lived 1831-1891.
[1093] The Unicorn and the Wasp
[1094] Dating Zygons: The Barnacled Baby (BBV audio #30) - The story ends with a shapechanging Zygon replacing Queen Victoria, and nothing is said about what happens next. Victoria definitely isn’t killed, as Demeris - as with the TV Zygons - can only assume the body print of a living subject, so it’s easy enough to imagine that the substitution is discovered and the real Victoria rescued. For that matter, it’s easy to retroactively think that the Victoria seen here is a ringer sent by Torchwood to investigate the mysterious and potentially extra-terrestrial “Baby” - would the actual Queen have been allowed to travel to the baby’s bedroom without a single escort? Prince Albert has died (so, the story occurs after 1861), but Barnum is alive (so, it’s before his passing in 1891).
[1095] Dating All-Consuming Fire (NA #27) - It is “the year eighteen eighty seven” according to both Watson (p5) and Benny (p153). References to The Talons of Weng-Chiang (p42, p64) suggest this book is set after that story, but aren’t conclusive.
[1096] Timewyrm: Revelation. This
was before All-Consuming Fire. The eighth Doctor also encountered Holmes, according to The Gallifrey Chronicles.
[1097] Happy Endings, elaborating upon details about Ace given in The Curse of Fenric novelisation; see the dating notes on Set Piece.
[1098] SJA: Children of Steel. Bloody Sunday occurred on 13th November, 1887.
[1099] The Moonbase. Surgeon Joseph Lister lived 5th April, 1827, to 10th February, 1912. Apollo 23 says the Doctor was given an honourary degree in rhetoric and oratory by the University of Ursa Beta. In The God Complex, he claims to have a degree in cheese-making.
[1100] Carnival of Monsters
[1101] Synthespians™
[1102] Year of the Pig
[1103] Dating The Ancestor Cell (EDA #36) - It’s “more than a hundred years” (p282) before 2001, and “one hundred and thirteen years” before in Escape Velocity (p184), which would make it 1888.
[1104] Vanishing Point
[1105] The Burning
[1106] Dating The Pit (NA #12) - Blake sees a newspaper dated “the thirtieth of September, 1888”. There’s some indication this takes place in a parallel timeline, so it’s not “the” Jack the Ripper murders.
[1107] Dating “Ripper’s Curse” (IDW DW Vol. 2 #2-4) - The opening caption says it’s “30 September 1888. 12:30 a.m”., which matches the real-life murder of Elizabeth Stride, the Ripper’s third canonical victim.
[1108] Dating “Ripper’s Curse” (IDW DW Vol. 2 #2-4) - Amy confirms that it’s “9th November”, the night of the final Ripper murder. Matrix and A Good Man Goes to War offer alternate explanations for Jack the Ripper (see the Unfixed Points in Time sidebar). “Ripper’s Curse”, very oddly, seems to ignore some new-series rules pertaining to historical alteration - the Doctor says that the Ripper’s victims are all “static” points in time, but tries to alter the final one anyway (see the Fixed Points in Time sidebar). Moreover, time is altered in this story - Mary Warner is “meant” to die, but the timeline is left with Mary Kelly (who died in our history) being killed instead.
It’s arguably an anachronism that a member of the Metropolitan police is so well acquainted with both Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle’s methodology in creating the character - the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published prior to this in 1887, but the character’s popularity didn’t take off until the first series of short stories emerged in The Strand, starting in 1891. However, the Earl of Upper Leadworth is fictional, suggesting that Holmes’ history in the Doctor Who universe is a deviation from the real world.
Unfixed Points in Time
Reconciling the three accounts of Jack the Ripper in Matrix, “Ripper’s Curse” and on screen in A Good Man Goes to War does tend towards absurdity - the Ripper is respectively shown to be the Valeyard, to be a murderous alien, and to be an unnamed party dispatched by Madame Vastra, all in seemingly unrelated adventures.
As a unifying theory about this, though, perhaps there’s a class of events that are destined to remain mysteries. After all, the main historical significance of the Jack the Ripper is that it’s famous as a mystery. Perhaps what happened remains unknown and open to question even after we’ve seen an explanation. (A whimsical example of this from real life: IDW’s publicity materials proclaimed that “Ripper’s Curse” would be the “first” time that Doctor Who had dealt with Jack the Ripper, a statement the company retracted when it was pointed out that actually, it wasn’t.)
This doesn’t rule out all mysteries being unsolved - the Doctor seems to conclusively solve the mystery of Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance in The Unicorn and the Wasp, for example. But it might account for why there are historical mysteries with multiple solutions in the Doctor Who universe. Candidates might include the beginning of the universe, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the exact origin of man, how and why the Pyramids were built, the purpose of standing stones, the Fall of Atlantis, the Great Fire of London, what happened to the Mary Celeste (only if one stacks the short story “Timechase” and the comic “The Mystery of the Marie Celeste” - both of them being outside the remit of this timeline - alongside The Chase), what happened at Tunguska, the sinking of the Titanic as well as a whole host of Fortean mysteries (the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, Roswell, flying saucers, etc.). Within the fiction of the Doctor Who universe, the exact origins of the Daleks, the start of the Sontaran-Rutan war, the beginnings of the Time Lords and the reason the Doctor left Gallifrey might be “unfixed”.
Great care should be taken, however, to distinguish between “unfixed” historical mysteries and simply things where there’s one explanation that’s not been uncovered. It’s also probably best not to use this as a handwave for any continuity problems - like, say, why the manned space program of the UNIT years is more advanced than the one seen in the new series, or the final fate of the planet Earth. But where Doctor Who has multiple explanations for the same historical mystery, we might usefully think the reason is that it’s “unfixed”.
[1109] Dating Matrix (PDA #16) - It’s during the time of the Ripper murders (the later part of 1888); the month is given as “November” (p155, 231). The last of the canonical Jack the Ripper murders took place on 9th November, 1888, so this is presumably after that.
[1110] Dating A Good Man Goes to War (X6.7) - As with Matrix, this is presumably after the last of the Ripper killings.
[1111] Dating SJA: Lost in Time (SJA 4.5) - The year is given.
[1112] Dating “The Time Machination” (IDW DW one-shot #2) - A caption says it’s “London 1889”, and Wells claims that he met the Doctor in Timelash “four or five years back” (even if the version of Wells seen here is very hard to reconcile against the slightly younger version seen on screen). The story ends with the fourth Doctor and Leela arriving at the beginning of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Lewis and Cooper seem attached to the Torchwood branch operating out of the West India Docks, although they are acquainted with Jack Harkness by “Final Sacrifice”.
[1113] “Final Sacrifice”
[1114] Dating The Talons of Weng-Chiang (14.6) - No date is given, and the story is trying to encapsulate an era, rather than a precise year. The story is set soon after the Jack the Ripper murders (1888), as Henry Gordon Jago refers to “Jolly Jack”. In the draft script, Casey went on to say that the new batch of disappearances can't be the Ripper because he “is in Canada”.
Litefoot is seen reading a copy of Blackwood’s Magazine from February 1892 in episode four... then again, there's also a modern newspaper visible in Litefoot's laundry in episode three, with a headline that references British politician Denis Healey, so both could be considered set dressing rather than definitive dating evidence.
The story takes place before The Bodysnatchers and possibly All-Consuming Fire (although that only mentions Mr Sin, so might refer to earlier activities than this story). The Jago & Litefoot audios, which most likely begin in 1892, seem to occur some months, more likely some years, after Talons.
The first edition of Timelink stated that it was 1895; the Telos version of the book goes for February 1892. About Time roughly concurred with the latter. The Terrestrial Index went for “c1890”.
[1115] “Ninety years” before K9 and Company.
[1116] The Crooked World
[1117] Ghost Ship. Zola lived 1840-1902.
[1118] TW: Miracle Day
[1119] Dating Vincent and the Doctor (X5.10) - The story entails Vincent painting The Church at Auvers, which Dr Black says was completed “somewhere between the 1st and 3rd of June 1890, less than a year before [van Gogh] killed himself”. Vincent died on 29th July, so while Black is technically right, it was more accurately about two months beforehand.
The story has a few anachronisms... Vincent has both ears, but in real life, he’d cut one off in December 1888. The Church at Avers was painted in 1890, but Vincent’s series of sunflower paintings (the creation of which Amy here influences) were done August 1888 to January 1889. The episode opens with Vincent painting Wheatfield with Crows, which was actu
ally completed some weeks after this story, around 10th July. (Then again, the opening might be more thematic than literal.) It’s perhaps excusable that Vincent appears to have signed “For Amy” in English, assuming the TARDIS is translating it; in real life, the work just bears Vincent’s signature.
[1120] Dating The Pandorica Opens (X5.12) - The year appears in a caption. Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia says this happened “a few weeks” after Vincent and the Doctor, so it’s very close to van Gogh’s death.
[1121] Dating The Story of Martha: “The Frozen Wastes” (NSA #28d) - The year and month are given.
[1122] Vincent and the Doctor. This happened on 29th July, 1890.
[1123] The Vampires of Venice
[1124] TW: “Fated to Pretend”
[1125] The prologue to FP: Erasing Sherlock, as published in FP: Warring States.
[1126] The Eleventh Tiger
[1127] The Death of Art
[1128] Dust Breeding. There are actually four different versions (and a lithograph) of The Scream, all created by Munch between 1893 and 1910.
[1129] Benny: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, following the continuity established in Conan Doyle’s stories. “The Final Problem”, where Sherlock seemed to perish, was set in 1891.
[1130] Utopia
[1131] Dating TimeH: The Severed Man (TimeH #5) - The year is repeatedly given. The Cabal’s links to Sodality are explained in TimeH: Child of Time (p64).
[1132] Dating The Mahogany Murderers (BF CC 3.11) and Jago & Litefoot Series 1, 2 and 3 (The Bloodless Soldier, 1.1; The Bellova Devil, 1.2; The Spirit Trap, 1.3; The Similarity Engine, 1.4; Litefoot and Sanders, 2.1; The Necropolis Express, 2.2; The Theatre of Dreams, 2.3; The Ruthven Inheritance, 2.4; Dead Men’s Tales, 3.1; The Man at the End of the Garden, 3.2; Swan Song, 3.3; Chronoclasm, 3.4) - The production notes for Jago & Litefoot Series 1 say, “The year is 1892. It is a short while after The Talons of Weng-Chiang, in which Litefoot reads the February 1892 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine. But unless we absolutely have to, we won’t mention specific dates. The stories exist in the limbo of the classic late Victorian era. Queen Victorian is on the throne, the British Empire seems to control most of the world, and science is the answer to all problems. London is a perpetual murk of... fogs and industrial pollution, and you can always charter a special railway train to get you wherever you need to go.”
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